Record Archive: Ready for its close-up

As it closes in on its 39th birthday next month, two local producers are pitching TV and cable execs a story idea about a local institution.

With the working title Record Archive: A Documentary Series, Chris Lavell and Fran Broderick assembled a 20-minute video introducing the Rochester indie music store to potential backers and buyers, and screened it Wednesday night for about 100 people at Record Archive, 33 1/3 Rockford St. The setting is the store's vast warehouse of CDs, kitsch and, most importantly to the story, vinyl records. The quick edits of the video blend customers camping out at the store front for Record Store Day, old Record Archive TV commercials featuring "Dancing Record Man" and owner Dick Storms, vintage campy movie clips and the interaction of store employees, particularly Mark Rapone and Lon Hackett.

Rapone and Hackett, two tattooed and bearded metal enthusiasts who share a droll wit and encyclopedic knowledge of vinyl albums, seem destined to emerge as the stars of this venture, if it catches the fancy of a network; and Lavell does seem to have some connections on that front. He took a handful of questions from the audience afterward. Some people were critical of the show handing over the final minutes of the video to an in-store performance by the up-and-upcoming indie band Bear Hands. I told Lavell afterward that I disagreed; after 20 minutes of frantic, quick-cut edits, I thought kicking back to watch a band play was Zen perfect. And that's what Record Archive is about. Music.

The promo video is a blend of the cult classic record-store film High Fidelity and the reality show Duck Dynasty, although all involved are quick to distance themselves from the Duck Dynasty reality show model. Duck Dynasty is largely a scripted show, featuring characters that were created for the viewers' entertainment. The Record Archive series is a documentary. Rapone and Hackett, with their chemistry and anti-chemistry, are real. A typical highlight from the video: Rapone addressing the rhetorical question, "How drunk is too drunk to work in a record store?"

Arts and entertainment:
The arts define our culture. Some folks believe a night out with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra is the apex of art, while an evening spent with drag queens is the death of Western Civilization. But in reality, arts and entertainment encompasses both of those extremes, and all that lies in between: Popular music, unpopular music, museums, galleries, theater, dance, comedy, film, books, photography, poetry, your kids’ construction-paper art projects and Elvis impersonators. &nbsp;<br />A Cleveland native, living in Texas taught me barbecue appreciation, and inspired me to form a competition team here, the Smokin’ Dopes. Three years in Northern Idaho lead me to believe and hope that Bigfoot really does exist. Interviewing Johnny Cash, James Brown and Patti Smith are my biggest professional thrills. Interviewing Ted Nugent was not.&nbsp;<br />